JavaScript closest

By  on  

When it comes to finding relationships between elements, we traditionally think of a top-down approach. We can thank CSS and querySelector/querySelectorAll for that relationship in selectors. What if we want to find an element's parent based on selector?

To look up the element tree and find a parent by selector, you can use HTMLElement's closest method:

// Our sample element is an "a" tag that matches ul > li > a
const link = document.querySelector('li a');
const list = a.closest('ul');

closest looks up the ancestor chain to find a matching parent element -- the opposite of traditional CSS selectors. You can provide closest a simple or complex selector to look upward for!

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!